Born in 1992 in Rennes, France, Victoria Palacios lives and works in Brussels, Belgium.
A 2019 graduate of the École de Recherche Graphique in Brussels, she builds a multidisciplinary practice that weaves narratives across a variety of media. At once performer, musician, and visual artist, her work moves fluidly between disciplines.
Like an orchestra conductor, Victoria Palacios orchestrates dialogues between image and language, weaving writing, music, performance, and theatre into her practice. The stories she appropriates take form through pictorial, performative, sculptural, and sonic approaches. Her works, often imbued with mystery and a ghostly theatricality, explore narratives that hover between reality and fiction. Victoria Palacios's practice aligns with a long artistic tradition in which emblematic figures of the spectacle-clowns, harlequins, and their kind-have been reimagined by masters of painting such as Manet, Toulouse-Lautrec, Ensor, Picasso, and, more recently, Condo and Pessoli.
Although this motif recurs throughout her work, the artist chooses to reinvent it by layering thick applications of paint onto surfaces as unconventional as they are playful-book covers, Crocs, even slices of bread. Challenging the traditional aesthetics of painting on canvas or wood, Victoria Palacios blurs the boundaries: the sacred seems to inhabit the everyday object; it emerges from the profane. Whether in sound, performance, or painting, her works feed into one another-affirming their roots in art history while opening it up to new narratives.
Her solo exhibitions include: Behind the curtain, the swans will always be two, melting like butter into the night at Gallery Vacancy during the Liste Art Fair, Basel (2024), Snails don't drool, They spit at Galerie Derouillon, Paris (2024), L'odeur de la boue at Pizza Gallery, Antwerp (2024), L'Éloquente triple flûte with Victor Delestre at Placement Produit, Aubervilliers (2023), Kalon Glaz at Panamax, Liège (2022), Stars of Bethlehem, Beech, Gorse at the SISSI Club, Marseille (2022), and L'Araignée at Brasseries Atlas, Brussels (2021).
Recent group exhibitions include Life in the Margin, MOU, Oudenaarde (2024), Fin du mois, jour de paie. Ou presque at the Zahltag, Spielact Festival, Geneva (2024), A Small Land of Watery Light at Gallery Vacancy, Shanghai (2024), You crack me up! with Angélique Aubrit and Ludovic Beillard at Wouters Gallery, Brussels (2024), La flemme ~ joy of missing out at Image/ Imatge, Orthez (2023), HOT GIRLS: She's A Keeper, He's A Catch at Red Herring Salon, Antwerp (2023), and Symbiosium at Fiminco x Centre Wallonie-Bruxelles, Paris (2023). She has also taken part in Fables Paniques at Ada Ventura, Brussels (2023), Zindering at l'Emergent, Veurne (2023), Silver Screen at Galerie Harkawk, Los Angeles (2022) and Dicke Luft - An exhibition by Tenzing Barshee, Galerie Bernhard, Zurich (2019).
Since 2024, she has been a member of the musical ensemble 5th of July, alongside Roman Hiele, Ferre Marnef, and Dennis Vanderauwera. She has staged several performances involving other actors, in which she also performs herself. In addition, she forms half of the musical duo Alto Fuero (Stroom Label) with Loto Retina, founded in 2022, and is among the artists selected for the SHAPE+ 2024 programme. The duo Alto Fuero recently performed at the opening of Nuits Botanique and at Les Halles de Schaerbeek in Brussels (2024) with their work Diboell. They also appeared at Lafayette Anticipations in Paris and at Les Siestes Électroniques in Toulouse (2024).
In 2025, she will present her first solo exhibition at Galerie Nathalie Obadia in Brussels.
She will also participate in the group exhibition Painting After Painting - Peinture Contemporaine en Belgique at S.M.A.K., the Municipal Museum of Contemporary Art in Ghent, Belgium.